Technical investigation into PS4 and XB1 audio solutions *spawn

[DrJay24]

I think they may not notice certain things but if more realistic sounds and more sounds and richer, movie-track-quality sounds could be in our games instead of what often sounds to me like imitated sounds?

then yes I think the difference will be noticeable for many

What does this have to do with hardware though? You are talking about how and what sounds are recorded. I suspect game sounds are done just like movies, most of it comes from pre-recorded collections they buy and the rest done by the sound engineers.

I'd say the sound quality and technology of a game like TLoU is better than most movies and at the point of diminishing returns given that most home's have crappy audio hardware. People playing with TV speakers or a sound bar are not going to benefit much from spending extra dev time and money on audio.

Playing GTA5 last night I never thought "this game needed more realistic audio", but it could use more pixels, more AA, etc. I've been gaming for 25 years, the change in audio is hardly noticeable once you get to 3D era circa Quake 2.

 

[warb]

Games are a bit more dynamic than movies though, so lots of processing will be required for them to sound right/better.

The other dynamic qualities of sound tell you a lot, on top of the direction. If we have better modeled sound propogation in games, that's probably something easier to discern than simply having higher quality samples, through typical crappy speakers.

 

[XpiderMX]

People playing with TV speakers or a sound bar are not going to benefit much from spending extra dev time and money on audio.

It is an issue for this people, but there are some gamers with better sound equipment (me, for example), and we will get benefits from new tech.

You sound like Nintendo, something like "eh! why you want HD games if most people have SD TVs?" (Wii era).

 

[DrJay24]

It is an issue for this people, but there are some gamers with better sound equipment (me, for example), and we will get benefits from new tech.

You sound like Nintendo, something like "eh! why you want HD games if most people have SD TVs?" (Wii era).

Let me know when their is a standard for "HD" audio that the gaming population is moving towards. The closest you have is 5.1, but that doesn't tell you much beyond the number of speakers. 720P and then 1080P TVs have been adopted and are standard. What analogous thing do we have for audio?

As a visual species we can see differences far more than we can hear them. That is why people spend money on screens, but rarely pay attention to audio. Even now audio is digressing as people realize that a good 5.1 setup takes too much space and money, sound bars are selling like mad. You also can't put audio improvement into marketing, there are no equivalent to screenshots and videos will just compress and mix the improvements into junk stereo. Who is going to put the effort into audio work when it is hard to sell and only 5% of the market can hear the improvements?

 

[djskribbles]

I have pretty expensive audio equipment and consider myself an audio enthusiast and I have been pretty happy with the audio in PS3 games.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Let me know when their is a standard for "HD" audio that the gaming population is moving towards. The closest you have is 5.1, but that doesn't tell you much beyond the number of speakers. 720P and then 1080P TVs have been adopted and are standard. What analogous thing do we have for audio?

Indeed. And for display, we're also looking towards VR headsets, so even if someone is happy with SD resolution, there's still a huge leap in immersion that's possible. The same is possible with audio, but until people make the leap, there can't be any progress towards that. The irony is that truly immersive audio only theortically needs a pair of headphones as the base hardware requirement, which doesn't have any of the drawbacks of stereo vision headsets! That's why I was hoping on of the consoles would pioneer audio progress - it needs to be on the system level and not something left to developers to experiment with, because the ROI just isn't there.

 

[XpiderMX]

Let me know when their is a standard for "HD" audio that the gaming population is moving towards. The closest you have is 5.1, but that doesn't tell you much beyond the number of speakers. 720P and then 1080P TVs have been adopted and are standard. What analogous thing do we have for audio?

Years of sd video and then 720p->1080p->4k in less than 10 years. A lot of gamers have changed from hearing stereo TV audio to better headsets with sorround sound (5.1/7.1).

Again, you sound like Nintendo xD

 

[Shifty Geezer]

A lot of gamers have changed from hearing stereo TV audio to better headsets with sorround sound (5.1/7.1).

You need to quantify that. It's easy to Google HDTV adoption and find results like 75% of US households. I am extremely doubtful that 75% of gamers have 5.1 headsets. I find it extremely doubtful if 1% of people who play games on consoles have 5.1 headsets! To make a case for developers to target surround audio in quality, you need to show them that there's a market of interested consumers. A lack of haardware adoption points to the opposite. Of course, it's chicken and egg. Without content, people have little interest in buying new audio gear, and without consumers, content providers have little interest in developing new technologies.

 

[DrJay24]

Years of sd video and then 720p->1080p->4k in less than 10 years. A lot of gamers have changed from hearing stereo TV audio to better headsets with sorround sound (5.1/7.1).

Again, you sound like Nintendo xD

90% of the perceived improvement in sound from fancy headphones is the fact that the sound is piped directly to the ears and not susceptible to bad speaker placement, background noise, bad calibration, bad acoustics, etc.

I don't quite understand your Nintendo reference, but whatever makes for better theatrics instead of data and facts...

 

[XpiderMX]

You need to quantify that. It's easy to Google HDTV adoption and find results like 75% of US households. I am extremely doubtful that 75% of gamers have 5.1 headsets. I find it extremely doubtful if 1% of people who play games on consoles have 5.1 headsets! To make a case for developers to target surround audio in quality, you need to show them that there's a market of interested consumers. A lack of haardware adoption points to the opposite. Of course, it's chicken and egg. Without content, people have little interest in buying new audio gear, and without consumers, content providers have little interest in developing new technologies.

I don't have any statistics, just my perception with people on forums and friends. I know, it is not enough for developers to support next gen audio, but the same can be said for HDTVs.

I don't quite understand your Nintendo reference, but whatever makes for better theatrics instead of data and facts...

Don't be mad, it is just a joke because Nintendo argued the same for online and HD gaming.

EDIT: Sorry if I bother you.

 

[Bigus Dickus]

There has been a progression in audio standards analogous to HD video. Stereo (two channel variety) » Dolby prologic » Dolby digital/dts » Dolby atmos or similar.

Atmos being the next. Technology step with vector encoded multichannel.

And the difference between two channel and a good multichannel encode can be huge perceptually. As can the difference between canned sound effects and environmentally correct raycasted sound.

But none of that matters... because many of you are correct in that far fewer people seem to care about improved audio quality than do video quality. Most people are perfectly happy with crappy TV speakers. In fact, even if they listen to and acknowledge the huge, easily audible difference a proper multichannel system brings, they are still apt to just say "meh, sounds great but I'm fine with what I have."

Part of that, maybe a big part, is that good multichannel that doesn't handcuff you with headphones (and even then the effect is lacking) takes space, isn't trivially cheap, requires some knowledge about placement and setup, probably requires even alterations to the room itself to achieve the best results, and still the risk is always there that your expensive audio gear will sound no better than crappy Bose because of poor setup.

But there's something more, I think related to how our sense of hearing evolved. We seem more adept at "hearing through" the delivery to concentrate on the content. Even me, a musician, audiophile, and at times owner of some quite nice audio gear, has no difficulty enjoying a great performance of a beautiful piano work recorded in the 60's and played back through a mono clock radio. Sure, I'd rather listen on a great system, and perhaps the emotional connection would then be quicker and even stronger, but the pitiful quality of recording and playback seems easily enough ignored even by someone who likes to think he demands audio perfection.

So getting widespread adoption of Dolby atmos or even good Dolby digital in the same manner as HD TV is always going to be an uphill battle. But even having said all that, I think MS made a good choice with the audio hardware and I'm glad they did. This is a console targeting a small segment of the population willing to spend money on good entertainment, and are more likely han average to appreciate the improvements. Especially if the transistors were essentially free, handle kinect tasks that are integral to MS vision for the console, and free up CPU resources that may benefit games in other areas.

 

[bkilian]

Let me know when their is a standard for "HD" audio that the gaming population is moving towards. The closest you have is 5.1, but that doesn't tell you much beyond the number of speakers. 720P and then 1080P TVs have been adopted and are standard. What analogous thing do we have for audio?

As a visual species we can see differences far more than we can hear them. That is why people spend money on screens, but rarely pay attention to audio. Even now audio is digressing as people realize that a good 5.1 setup takes too much space and money, sound bars are selling like mad. You also can't put audio improvement into marketing, there are no equivalent to screenshots and videos will just compress and mix the improvements into junk stereo. Who is going to put the effort into audio work when it is hard to sell and only 5% of the market can hear the improvements?

Why should developers concentrate on colour and gamma accuracy when almost no one has a properly calibrated TV? Just like "5.1" is just a number of speakers. 1080P doesn't tell you anything beyond the number of pixels.

You'll note most games contain a video calibrator so you can sorta match your gamma to what they coded to. Why could they not do that for audio?

Your point is correct in that we're mostly a visual species, and that's why the visuals get emphasized more, but you are not correct that it's because there are no audio standards. There are both numerical (5.1, 48KHz, etc) standards and quality (THX certification).

 

[Jay]

Could Kinect be used to calibrate XB1 to speaker and sitting positions?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Your point is correct in that we're mostly a visual species, and that's why the visuals get emphasized more, but you are not correct that it's because there are no audio standards. There are both numerical (5.1, 48KHz, etc) standards and quality (THX certification).

5.1 and THX certified aren't standards of in-game audio quality and effects though. If we compare visual standards, things like 1080p and 60 fps equate to 48 kHz and 16 bit. 3DTV would equate to 5.1. VR headsets would pair up with binaural audio.

What audio is lacking is a set of feature standards like GI, DOF and motion blur. Audio has reverb and sound positioning, which is maybe akin to dynamic lights and shadows in the visual domain. There's very little else. The next step forwards in features would be environmental impact on audio. Where we've been watching visual rendering technology improve year on year with new technology, audio has been stuck in a rut, and there isn't obviously a great deal more that can be added.

 

[XpiderMX]

Where we've been watching visual rendering technology improve year on year with new technology, audio has been stuck in a rut, and there isn't obviously a great deal more that can be added.

The lack of (powerful) sound hardware? We know that CoD: Ghosts will do more things (with sound) than current gen version.

 

[DrJay24]

The lack of (powerful) sound hardware? We know that CoD: Ghosts will do more things (with sound) than current gen version.

What is the excuse for PCs where CPUs have been over powered for years, some cores are near idle for many games. Hell, dedicated audio has gone the way of the Dodo. Gaming audio is just waiting for consoles to get faster hardware?

 

[XpiderMX]

What is the excuse for PCs where CPUs have been over powered for years, some cores are near idle for many games. Hell, dedicated audio has gone the way of the Dodo. Gaming audio is just waiting for consoles to get faster hardware?

Well, IMHO PC gaming is behind consoles since 2007 and consoles can push the utilization of better sound development.

EDIT: But well, it is just my opinion.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

What is the excuse for PCs where CPUs have been over powered for years, some cores are near idle for many games. Hell, dedicated audio has gone the way of the Dodo. Gaming audio is just waiting for consoles to get faster hardware?

Because not everyone has the most powerful CPU. The best thing about PC's is that you can use anything to build them. The worst thing about PC's is that you can use anything to build them.

Back when there was an open licensing audio API standard along with hardware to support it, both first party and third party, audio experimentation flourished. Once that API went closed license, the hardware dried up (no more third party hardware could support it) and the API died.

Unfortunately, Microsoft at the time were not interested in environmental modeling or audio processing. Hence they only thing they included in DirectX was support for positional audio.

So, there was no avenue on PC for developers to really attempt to experiment with audio manipulation as there was no longer a standard API along with hardware that could guarantee a minimum amount of performance, in other words so they didn't run the risk of making a game unplayable on low end systems.

And while positional audio and audio sound quality overall may be better now than it was over a decade ago, the things being done with the audio are far worse now than it was back then. To the point where game audio still feels very artificial and "empty" in modern day games to me, compared to what we had back then.

Regards,
SB

 

[SlimJim]

Try Battlefield Company, or The Last of Us then: they easily blow away any game from the late 90's or whichever time period you were referring to.
As with graphics (for example: if PS3 and 360 have comparable HW/ are both equally powerful, then compare gears of war to uncharted or gt to forza), it all comes down to the developer, and not really the hardware.
As a matter of fact: I think this supposed Xbox One audio HW advantage will be wasted on most of it's developers. There was nothing stopping them this past generation from having best in class audio design, hardware wise.

 

[Relab]

What audio is lacking is a set of feature standards like GI, DOF and motion blur. Audio has reverb and sound positioning, which is maybe akin to dynamic lights and shadows in the visual domain. There's very little else. The next step forwards in features would be environmental impact on audio. Where we've been watching visual rendering technology improve year on year with new technology, audio has been stuck in a rut, and there isn't obviously a great deal more that can be added.

Audio is bound to the exact same physical phenomenas as other wave based effects (light etc) - reflection, refraction, diffraction, dispersion, propagation, transmission etc. Many of those phenomenas can be eliminated in light simulations because of the very short wavelength, but that's not the case for sound simulations. There's a lot of 'features' in sound processing, just like in graphic processing. Advancement in audio technologies is FAR from stuck in a nut - look at odeon.dk and catt.se - and we're far from finished. Unfortunately most of the audio reseach is not public domain which is completely different compared to graphic research.

The current generation audio technologies (and next gen) used in game development is far from the quality found in the professional market and it has nothing to do with hardware. It's a question about knowledge and resources (priority).